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Zor

Good episode. Sadly, it reminds me of members in my family and what eventually will happen.

Man during the third season I started to wonder if Starfleet has some kind of named characters only policy when it came to dishing out the new uniforms. You have replicators so scarcity isn't a problem, but look at the fight in Ten Forward. Every extra has the old pajama uniforms, while everyone with their names in the opening credits (except Troi lol) have the new ones.

Oh, I just realized, the title of the thread is 'Sarak', when the name of the character and episode is 'Sarek'.

Destructionator XIII wrote:

OsirisLord wrote:You have replicators so scarcity isn't a problem, but look at the fight in Ten Forward.

They don't have replicators in real life. Only so many of the costumes were actually made.

SoD!

Obviously the crew are retards.

Stofsk wrote: SoD!

Obviously the crew are retards.

Perhaps the pajamas are actually more comfortable to wear and the crew help unto them as long as possible. An added bonus is that you can actually sleep in your uniform, so you are always ready for duty at a moments notice

FaxModem1 wrote:Oh, I just realized, the title of the thread is 'Sarak', when the name of the character and episode is 'Sarek'.

Fixed.

OsirisLord wrote:Man during the third season I started to wonder if Starfleet has some kind of named characters only policy when it came to dishing out the new uniforms. You have replicators so scarcity isn't a problem, but look at the fight in Ten Forward. Every extra has the old pajama uniforms, while everyone with their names in the opening credits (except Troi lol) have the new ones.

Who do you know that wears spandex to bed?

Marcus Aurelius wrote:

Stofsk wrote: SoD!

Obviously the crew are retards.

Perhaps the pajamas are actually more comfortable to wear and the crew help unto them as long as possible. An added bonus is that you can actually sleep in your uniform, so you are always ready for duty at a moments notice

Pretty sure they were intended by the writers to be some sort of crazy space-clothing that was more comfortable to wear than most modern clothing would be today. The actual costumes themselves were made so tightly that Patrick Stewart was suffering back pains from wearing it and forced them to revise the outfits for the third season.

OsirisLord wrote:Man during the third season I started to wonder if Starfleet has some kind of named characters only policy when it came to dishing out the new uniforms. You have replicators so scarcity isn't a problem, but look at the fight in Ten Forward. Every extra has the old pajama uniforms, while everyone with their names in the opening credits (except Troi lol) have the new ones.

It's almost as if the uniforms were actually costumes produced by a television studio that didn't have the budget to replace them all at once. Impossible to imagine, I know.

One of the best TNG episodes, thanks.

You can get an "ORIGINAL production STARFLEET TNG" uniform for about $2500 a pop, though I can't vouch for the authenticity. The price to the studio are probably similar (though I must note it was marked down from $3000 Canadian).

Hey, "You'll get more action out of a good book than you'll get on this date, I guarantee". Then Wesley was hit with a Reading Rainbow shooting out of Geordi's visor.

RedImperator wrote:

OsirisLord wrote:Man during the third season I started to wonder if Starfleet has some kind of named characters only policy when it came to dishing out the new uniforms. You have replicators so scarcity isn't a problem, but look at the fight in Ten Forward. Every extra has the old pajama uniforms, while everyone with their names in the opening credits (except Troi lol) have the new ones.

It's almost as if the uniforms were actually costumes produced by a television studio that didn't have the budget to replace them all at once. Impossible to imagine, I know.

Heh.

Yeah, it's true with any custom-made costumes on a TV budget. Take Stargate Atlantis; a lot of the extras from Season 2 onwards were simply wearing old SGC costumes instead of Atlantis Expedition uniforms.

JME2 wrote:Yeah, it's true with any custom-made costumes on a TV budget. Take Stargate Atlantis; a lot of the extras from Season 2 onwards were simply wearing old SGC costumes instead of Atlantis Expedition uniforms.

How much do uniforms and suchlike cost anyway?

Zor

How long's a piece of string? Depends on a whole shit load of things, from what materials you use to what the design is (i.e. simple design versus something complicated), plus the whole step of designing it from concept sketches to final article, how many you need to make, not just for your principals but also for guest stars and extras, plus spares, and maintenance would factor into it as well - cleaning and making sure they're in a presentable condition.

Most SciFi shows have to worry about costumes. They can't exactly go to the store and just buy any piece of clothing. So a lot of shows have Hero costumes, and then cheaper look alikes intended to use further away from the camera. In Trek's case they used the early season uniforms for years on the background people. Why? Because they looked pretty damned similar. I myself never noticed when I first watched TNG.

Some shows have it easy. SG1 and Stargate Universe both largely use existing US military uniforms with minor alterations. And buying existing clothing is cheap compared to designing your own.

Destructionator XIII wrote:I'm curious, do any of you know how much it cost them to create one of the uniforms for the show?

I figure it is probably one or two thousand bucks. They are surely hand made (you can't exactly buy a custom costume at the corner store) which cranks the cost up, but they are pretty simple too, so it can't be too horribly expensive. Of course, even this would add up fast if they got them for all the extras too!

I can't recall the precise source to double-check this, so take it with a grain of salt, but I recall one behind the scenes show or feature mentioning that the new costumes cost about three thousand each. This was explicitly noted as being the reason that the background extras continued to use the older spandex outfits.

IIRC, it was also the reason Generations used a mix of the old TNG outfits and Voyager uniforms. They had originally planned to introduce a new version of the Starfleet uniforms in Generations. The movie tie-in action figures even featured the new uniform design (conceptual artwork for the uniforms can be seen here). But the cost of making new uniforms was ultimately deemed prohibitive and they simply used existing stock instead.

Pretty sure it was DS9 they borrowed from, not Voyager; supposedly Frakes got Avery Brooks' costume, and Burton got Colm Meaney's costume.

They still made a costume for Stewart and Spinner. Those two had so much screen time it demanded it.

Alyeska wrote:SG1 and Stargate Universe both largely use existing US military uniforms with minor alterations. And buying existing clothing is cheap compared to designing your own.

Whereas the Atlantis Expedition uniforms (both the Season 1-3 and Season 4-5 versions) were custom.

Those original designs for the GEN uniforms - they're not too bad.

It also cuts you slack if you get the uniforms you want on the first go. TNG was saddled with the season 1 uniforms, and made enough to last a show at the start before realizing they sucked. At that point they become a resource you'd better find some use for. The TOS movies did the same thing...those awful uniforms from TMP were dyed and recycled to become the enlisted uniforms for the next six films, while mostly named characters got the good uniforms (plus a lucky extra or two).

It helps if you get the style of the series right at the start.